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Will 2017 become the year of the editable tweet?

Twitter, like the typewriter, does not make corrections easy.

If you’ve ever been on Twitter, I’m willing to bet you’ve lamented (or cursed, depending on your temperament) the social network’s lack of an edit button. Once you hit send on your tweet you can’t bring it back to fix a typo, punch up a joke or soften a harsh statement. Your only recourse is to delete and start over.

But in my time following technology news and dealing with computers, I’ve learned one rule that applies to just about any situation.

Nothing is as easy as it should be.

As Saqib Shah wrote at digitaltrends.com, the addition of an edit button to Twitter raises other questions. Should there be a limited time available to edit a tweet? What about a change log so you can still see all the iterations of a particular tweet? What happens if you accidentally retweet an older version of a tweet that the author didn’t want to circulate? Or should a user just be able to edit infinitely, cleaning all objectionable tweets in his/her timeline without deleting them?

Right now, if you want to change your tweet you have to delete it and rewrite it. It’s a pain, but as tasks go it’s fairly low on the annoyance scale. The key is to check what you write before you post it.

We can look to older technology for a lesson in how to handle this. Take typing classes. When I learned how to type on a typewriter, we weren’t allowed to correct our mistakes. Speed mattered, and fixing typos slowed you down. So you had to keep typing, errors and all. The point was to teach you to type quickly and accurately.

If you don’t have a forgiving environment for making mistakes, you learn not to make them. The many, many typos and ill-conceived tweets on Twitter show that not everyone has learned this. But if Twitter becomes editable, users run the risk of becoming more sloppy, both in thought and execution, because they will be able to fix it later.

I would certainly use an edit button on Twitter if it became available. But I’d rather see the company crack down on trolls. Hate speech is so much more disturbing than spelling mistakes and broken hyperlinks.